MikroTips: managing many access points with CAPsMAN

hi guys let's talk about wireless networks let's say you have a wireless router at home like my hap ac3 and you would like to extend the wireless coverage to some other rooms maybe your garden maybe your garage or a further room and instead of moving the router around like you could you want to add another router to your home network microtex has a special feature called the caps manager capsman and it allows the central router to become a controller for other devices so what it would mean is that you can add other microtech devices to this router and they will all be controlled by the main unit and all will have the same network name the same password and will be easier to manage and you can add any microtech router to your setup in my case here i have a cap ac and in this video i will show you how to do it yourself it's actually quite easy there are ways to do it with a quick set but i'll just show you step by step so that you know how to do it and how it all works okay so what we will do with the hep ac3 which is our main unit is first we will turn it into the caps manager and then we will make it manage itself so it has built-in wireless interfaces and you want to manage those interfaces as well not just the other routers so let's start with that we will go into the wireless menu and here you see you have two built-in wireless interfaces so this is the two and five gigahertz interfaces now go into the capsman menu here all you need to do is click on the manager button and enable the manager and this is all you need to do click ok and now the capsman server is running and now if you go into the wireless menu here and click on the cap button this will make the router work as a controlled access point so it will no longer control its settings directly but it will do this uh through the capsman so capsman will send all the settings to these interfaces so let's enable the cap mode and here we have pre-selected already the interfaces wireless1 and wireless2 and and here you need to specify the address of your capsman server and in my case i want to manage the devices the built-in interfaces right here inside the same unit so i don't have the server somewhere else it's the same device so in my case it's the local host address and as you know localhost is one two seven zero zero one so uh enter this capsman as the caps manager so it will be looking for the capsman server right here in the same device so let's click ok and now you see these interfaces are managed by capsman so you cannot edit any settings it will not allow to change anything everything will be done by the capsman and in the capsman window here we basically don't need this anymore the wireless window can be closed so everything now happens here so let me just quickly tell you what these tabs do but we don't have to configure all of the settings there are just a few things that are required so that it all works but of course you can always just like with any feature in the microtech router you can always customize everything and and do all kinds of crazy setups but in our case i just want to show you the bare minimum so to get the caps capsment setup working so in in in this first tab the cap interfaces will be shown but there's nothing here because we're not controlling anything yet uh because first we need to go and set up a configuration template everything in capsman is done with templates so add a new template you can give it a name or something and now you'll see all kinds of wireless settings now the capsman will do everything automatically if you don't set anything so you're not required to actually set all these settings here but what we do need is to set the mode as an access point provide this ssid ssid is the network name so let's just call it uh home or something so this will be the network name will be home and all these other settings are optional but i recommend setting the country because this will make sure that your device is following the regulations of your country you can set the installation to indoor if it's an indoor router and the distance can be also endorsed so these settings are just recommended so that all the output powers are set according to the country regulations other things we can leave here but in the channel you could specify a specific frequency if you want but in my case i just will leave it alone and it will just select some kind of frequency automatically side note if you want to set up two networks one for two gigahertz and one for five gigahertz you will have to make a separate template for each of them because each frequency has different kinds of settings so and if you want to have a separate ssid and the network name is different for example i can i could set up home two gigahertz and home five gigahertz but i don't care i want a single name for all my networks i don't want to think about which access point to use all my devices will automatically select whatever they want to use so i'll just leave this alone for sake of simplicity then the rates can be left alone and all of these settings but security we do need it allows to set the template for security as well but i don't have a template yet so i'll just set it directly here in the main template the main template is the configuration and here i can specify wpa encryption aes and a passphrase home password one think of a better password and this can be directly entered into the main configuration template here in in the configurations tab everything you enter here it will be just taken directly from this template but if you want to make a really specific setup and and you want to create several networks with a different kind of password for each ssid you can do that you just need to go into the security make a new template specify passwords here and then you would choose that template here in the security drop down here and as you see in the data path and in the raids and channels everywhere you can select templates but we have a simple network we we don't need all those other settings so we will just directly enter them into the configuration and we'll not be using any other templates so i have set up an ap the ssid is home distance country and the security password that's all i i need here so i just made it and i will leave all these other tabs alone because my setup is just simple and once you have set up what configuration you want to give to those access points that you're going to manage then you need to set up the rules how and where to send this information so this is called provisioning in provisioning add a new provisioning rule here you could specify um which routers need to get which configuration for example maybe some specific mac addresses want you want to give them this configuration and some configuration to others you can do that but we're going to leave this all alone it's it's very simple actually so what you need to do is set that this provisioning rule will create dynamic and enabled interfaces and it's going to use the configuration you just created called cfg1 i didn't give it a name but you can give it to something understandable and here you can specify for example if you have a lot of routers then you can give them some kind of format how their names are going to be created so for example prefix identity and it it would it will create the cap interfaces and each of them will have the name the same as their actual hardware router has in in its identity settings uh i'll just leave this alone so um click ok now go into the radio tab here you have devices that are already connected to the caps man and we can click provision on these devices so the the the rules are now being sent to these two devices and then if you go into the cap tab here it's created two two access points one is for the two gigahertz one is for the five gigahertz so it's as easy as that and now the built-in interfaces that are in the wireless tab here both of them have received the settings that you uh enter so in our case it's simply ssid home and and the password that i said everything else is automatic the frequency is automatic you don't have to worry about any of those things so it's very simple and now what we need to do we want to add the actual other device that we have purchased so in my case uh it's the cap ac here so it can be any microtech router like i said and you don't actually have to configure it that's the the best part you take it out of the box and you you take a ethernet cable and well in my case the power will be coming from the hep ac because the the port number five is giving out uh power over ethernet but of course in in in your case you could be powering it with a power jack if your device has a power jack so in my case it will take the power from the main access point so i only need one cable so it can be a very long cable you can pull the cable to your garage and mount the device there and then it can be without any configuration at all or it can be straight out from the box it doesn't matter what configuration it has i recommend doing a system reset but in any case so what you need to do now is find the reset button on the device so the reset button allows you to do several things not just reset and reinstall it also has a function to start the cap device or i mean the to start this device in a cap mode so cap mode is the controlled access point mode what will happen is that i will hold the button and i will look at the led light the led light here will indicate what's going on so i need to look at the led light and first it will start flashing that means it's asking you if you want to reset the unit then it will turn solid that means if i release the button at that moment it will boot into the cap mode that's what we need and if i leave it longer when the light goes out it will start in the net install mode for reinstallation we don't need that so what i need to do is i i need to plug it into the first ethernet port here ether1 then i need to hold the reset button and then i need to plug it into my main router in any any port in my case i'm going to use the poe port because i need the power from here so let me just hold the button and and hold the button and plug it in and now the device is booting and i'm looking at the user led here so you will not see it but just trust me so now it's blinking now it's stopping i'm releasing the button and this is going to make the device start looking for capsment servers and all i need to do now is wait there it is it simply appeared here in the list so first in the remote cap tab first one is this device like i told you before the hap ac3 is controlling its own in internal interfaces so it's sending the configuration to those interfaces and telling them okay now you must use the ssid home and the password and then it's also waiting and listening for any other uh controlled access points to that want to join in and so our cap ac unit just appeared here in the list and all it took is taking the unit out of the box and booting it with holding the button so what you need to do now is take any number of any kind of microtech access point devices it can be webs other apps any kind of wireless device that microtec is making and all you need to do is boot them by holding the reset button and release the button when it turns solid so solid green in my case here and that's all it will just simply appear in the list here and it's already being provisioned with the configuration and here in the cap interfaces you can see i already have four access points running the same configuration now i could take another one and another one and i can even when i run out of ports i can attach a switch to one of the lan ports and i can boot 10 of them or more and all of them will be just running the same configuration and that's all that's all you need to do and if you want this is a microtech unit you so it means it has tons of different features and if you want you can create other provisioning rules you can you can set uh make guest networks you can you can assign different types of configurations to different types of routers based on their size maybe some of them have bigger antennas and you want those to to have some other settings maybe maybe you have outdoor units in your network those could have other wi-fi settings maybe you need different network names for example if it's a large area maybe you want a guest network that has no password and the other units maybe need a password so all of you all of these things you can do using these templates so like i said before provisioning tells which configuration to send to which units the configuration tab is your main template that contains either directly entered configuration or it will uh take the templates that you select here so channels rates data paths security those can be configured in these other tabs but in my case i just didn't use the templates i directly entered in them into the main configuration template and here in the remote cap tab i see all the physical devices that have joined in in this capsman setup so here we have my built-in interfaces and the cap is here and you can see the version they're running and uh you can even make them upgrade themselves if needed so that's a another thing you can do and each of these devices have two built-in radios two gigahertz five gigahertz so total of four this is why we have four cap interfaces and in the registration table you will see all the devices that have connected to your caps man so if you have phones and laptops and tvs and all your devices they will only see a single network name in my case i set it up as home and they will just uh when you go into the wi-fi settings you'll see home and you will not have to care which device is located where where you need to connect now who has the strongest signal it will no longer matter everything is managed centrally the registration table is uh single for all of your devices and then you will see which device has joined to which access point and you'll be able to to to manage them here but from the user perspective it's going to be a single network and they don't even know where they're connected they don't care they don't have to care so it's it's becoming very easy for them and easy for you so you don't have to configure each access point separately anymore so they just have to be booted into caps mode and that's it so all you need to do is create the configuration file here set one provisioning rule and that's it so i hope you find this tutorial useful and good luck in building your first capsman network

Channel: MikroTik

Views: 14,791

Rating: 4.936255 out of 5

Keywords: mikrotik, routerboard, routeros, latvia

Id: taQ70m0DVYA

Length: 18min 7sec (1087 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 20 2021